On Being My Mother's Editor
There was a time in college when I told my mother that if I were dead she'd hear about it, so could she please stop calling all my friends--I was fine, it was finals week, I had told her about this! She'd been calling me for days, and I'd been either missing her calls or ignoring them, frantic and caffeine-high and sleepless as I wrote one long-delayed finals paper after another, hoping they sounded coherent. My mom had resorted to calling my high school friends whose numbers